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When The Lowbrow Road Show’s really on fire, it’s not so much opinion as fact. And while Big John Bates and his band slap out a mix of punk and jump blues, shimmying burlesque dancers light their bodies on fire, twirl flaming batons, and take the naughty old tassel-shaking routine to a dangerous level — yep, those are on fire, too. The Lowbrow Road Show crawls seductively into Fishlips on Friday. Bates and the saucy burlesque troupe the Voodoo Dollz revive the aggressive, sexed-up grindhouse and pulp subcultures of the ’60s. Bates’ mix of punk, swamp guitar and jump blues, what he calls “hot rod blues,” attracts the tattooed rockabilly boys and pin-up girls of the custom car subculture, but he doesn’t consider himself a rockabilly artist. Big John admires The Cramps and Social Distortion as much as he digs Cab Calloway. He enlisted the Voodoo Dollz when an ex-girlfriend, an exotic dancer, gave burlesque a try. “I always liked the Alice Coopers who bring a show to town,” he says. “The music’s important, but so is the visual and it all gets married together.” Bates spoke to The Californian by phone from his boat in Vancouver. What’s The Lowbrow Road Show like? The girls are dancing while we’re playing. They do costume changes while we continue to play onstage. We do seven costume changes. The girls set themselves on fire in different ways, sexy ways. Not in a Great White kind of way. I’ve got a wicked top hat with bear claws on it. Black and gold zoot pants, the whole stage we like to do in black and gold. Cool outfits we created ourselves or with costume people we work with. Are your songs mostly about dangerous women, the stuff of ’60s underground movies? The movie “Sin City,” Frank Miller, that’s lyrically where we go with it. The women are usually strong and there are three girls in our group and two guys. We prefer to write about women that are in control, taking charge of their own destinies. If they’re bad girls, it’s because they choose to be bad. Our latest video for “Burlesque Is Dead” that is online is totally grindhouse style. On the last album, “Aren’t You Pretty,” is a true story and the person that is written about is sampled on the record. One of my ex-girlfriends went kind of nuts, turned into a bit of stalker. I had to call the police. She’s better now, we’re friends. I used her crazy voice messages. She calls me, flipping out. I edited it for content. You were featured in an A&E documentary about Russ Meyer, who wrote and directed the cult ’60s film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” I’m not a big fan of the culture we all get force-fed. So when I looked for different things, Russ was one of the things I found. I found all sorts of crazy stuff like that. He always portrayed women as strong. They’d always have the last laugh. (A&E) followed me around in a big Cadillac and asked me how Russ influenced the group. I said lyrically, for sure. For the Voodoo Dollz, for the performance. On “Kitten With A Whip,” they were doing a pretty good send-up of (go-go dancing) in “Faster, Pussycat.”
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